The kitchen was always the hub of my Grandparents’ home. From breakfast around the slightly-too-big table, with Grandma and Granddad and fruit salad on cornflakes, to everyone pitching in after Christmas Dinner to clean all the plates and sort out the leftovers before we opened presents.

The view from the sink is wonderful!

I want it to play the same central role when we move in to the house, but with the opportunity to remodel, we are enlarging the space by knocking through into the downstairs bathroom (our main bathroom will be upstairs). This will create a separate space for a table without encroaching on the cooking area, lots of storage, and a fantastic long worktop for food preparation.

Original kitchen to living room view, front door on the right of the picture.

At the moment, the kitchen links onto the living room with an open doorway, but this will be blocked up and replaced with a door at the opposite end of the kitchen from the porch door, creating a through route to the main hallway.

The “front” door is a bit of an oddity – it’s very much at the side of the house, and you have to walk across the front of the house to get to it from the driveway. When Granddad first built the house, the front door was at the opposite side of the house to the kitchen and, as you might expect, opened on to a hallway. When he put the garage on the side of the house in the early 1960s, the natural main entrance moved to the kitchen, with a porch added in front of the kitchen door much more recently (it was one of those projects that kept being put back). To the eternal confusion of the postman, there appeared to be two front doors, complete with two letter boxes. We have simplified this slightly by replacing the front of the garage so removing the smaller garage door – hopefully this will mean we get half as much spam post!

It was very odd starting to dismantle the kitchen.

We stayed in the house last summer and, as well as sorting through my Grandparents’ possessions, we started to take apart some of the kitchen units. It was both great and sad to remember lots of family stories, but exciting to look forward to making new memories (and jam and cakes) when we live there.